


Wake Up to the Silence

by Eustace (Sibylline)



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Self-Esteem Issues, Teacher-Student Relationship, really former student- former teacher relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 01:40:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14321742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sibylline/pseuds/Eustace
Summary: Uh, so. Here’s a story that no-one asked for:Mayakovsy and Penny alone together in the Arctic while magic slowly dies and the world shakes itself apart.Low self-esteem, self-loathing, taking the long way around to self- destruction. You know, the usual reasons that people fuck up and fuck each other.





	Wake Up to the Silence

**Author's Note:**

> Found this 85% finished in my google drive - I wrote it months ago, and uh. Who would have thought that no one wrote Penny/Mayakovsy before? Answer: Everyone, because IDEK where this came from. Except how tenderly Mayakovsky put that centipede on Penny's arm. And also if you love someone you gotta set them free. (from a magic tattoo. by carving it out of their skin). I realize it’s a skeevy relationship from the outset and Misha Mayakovsky is not a nice man. Penny realizes this too.
> 
> Enjoy! (or something)

They’re stuttering towards the end of the world, Mayakovsky’s hedging his bets with his batteries but Penny thinks that if some pissy elder god turn off the lights, he might as well try to face down the frigid, endless arctic night with a packet of birthday candles. You’re just prolonging the inevitable. Still, he untangles the knots, files the table to sawdust, just to have something to do with his hands.

He thinks about the death of magic. How his hands will stay hands, nothing more, never conduits channeling something greater. He thinks about Quentin, whose hands are whole and whose heart is broken, who condemned himself to an extremely specific personal hell of cubicles and boardrooms and the slow noose of tight starched collars. He thinks about how, with almost anything in life that’s worthwhile, you don’t know how good it was until it’s gone. Not until you’re in the shallow-grave ditch of a comedown,  looking at an empty bottle, empty hands, an empty bed.

 

In the arctic, there is no light but for that of Brakebills South, nothing to dilute the darkness after sunset, and the stars are jagged and too-bright, hung in unfamiliar constellations and stretching out and out and out to the horizon. When Penny is sleepless, he stares up at the drift of stars. The arrangement may differ, but here, as in any hemisphere, the stars are steady and indifferent. It reminds him of home.

 

Now, Penny, when he enters any room, is pretty sure the people in it will learn to hate him once they really get to know him. Maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, but he hasn’t been proved wrong yet. It just takes longer with some people than others.

Penny can feel the weight of Mayakovsky’s gaze on him. He doesn’t doubt that Mayakovsky deserved exile, arrogant and careless with the lives of others; it was that last relationship with a student that had gone so catastrophically wrong, but it couldn’t have been the first time he’d caused damage. Fogg, willfully blind even before the run-in with the Beast, had acted only when the damage was impossible to ignore.

Still, Penny can feel Mayakovsky’s terrible loneliness, his hunger. He’d said that he had made love to many students, hadn’t specified a particular gender. The idea that Penny could seduce him, seduce anyone, is laughable. And yet, he makes himself available, figures that sooner or later, out of curiosity or boredom or loneliness, it’ll be inevitable. He thinks, Mayakovsky already knows that he’ll let him carve the skin off his body, what else could possibly be off limits?

(He's always been a rebound fuck, the one you turn to when you’re drunk or high and looking a small act of self destruction in the form of a warm body, and his is good enough; he’s not the one that you’ll make pancakes the next morning, will introduce to your friends or tell your mom about, will write on your notebooks with hearts around— Kady was the exception and Alice was the rule.)

 

It seems like Mayakovsky’s put his plan to drink himself to death on hold—not that he’s given up drinking. Just less, just doesn’t seem to be seeking oblivion with the same fervor. The death rattles of magic seem to have given him a direction that isn’t fueled by bitter rage and aimed at ever more rapidly impending liver failure. Now when he drinks, he pours for two, and with sawdust in his hair and raw knuckles and Mayakovsky’s lichen vodka burning in his stomach, he asks whether, when magic dies, the incorporate bond will be broken. Mayakovsky says, _Most likely._  Throws back another mouthful and stares at the dark windows. _And if it isn’t,_ Penny asks.

 _Well. Then all other spells will fail, supplies will run out And I will die of starvation and hypothermia_. He shrugs.

And Penny realizes: If magic doesn’t fail, the outcome will be the same-- Mayakovsky will still die alone. The cause and timing will change, but all paths converge upon that one point.

It seems like he must have been in some different world, the last time he was here ( _because it_ is _a whole new world, now, without magic, too cold and too dark and too quiet_ ) When he’d tied himself to an anchor and let himself drown, when Mayakovsky carved him free, dragged him back up, left scar tissue behind. And now he’s back, fucked it up again in a whole new way. Got caught in a trap, tried to loose himself, turns out he was just chewing his own leg off. Hands off. 

Whatever.

There’s a metaphor that works somewhere, he doesn’t care enough to find it, there’s a parable in here somewhere, but it can go fuck itself. He doesn’t think he’ll get another shot, this time around, he isn’t betting on being forgiven.

He thinks of that other world, Mayakovsky’s eyes on his and blood running down his arm. So much for being more free than anyone else in this universe.

Blood on the floor of the study,  Penny white-knuckled and unbound and unmoored and choking down any sound of pain. _Too unpredictable, too hard to control._ The anger in Mayakovsky’s eyes when he saw the tattoo. _Chained to a rock_ . Take away _astral_ from the projection and maybe you’ll have the truth.

 

Eventually Penny falls asleep, despite the room spinning even with his eyes close, fucking vestibular system, lies on his stomach so he doesn’t choke to death on his own puke in the night, then contemplates rolling on his back because maybe he’ll choke to death on his own puke in the night, there are worse ways to go out.

And eventually he wakes up, wakes up hurting, feels like something crawled out of his chest and died in his mouth.

Mayagovsky walks in and _why are his feet so fucking loud_ , _fuck._ He puts something on the ground near Penny’s head. He catches a whiff when he breathes, and— a hangover cure, he thinks, smells like that shit that Margo brewed up for him but worse. He turns his poor throbbing head and takes the cup with his stupid useless hands, and he slugs it down. His mouth still tastes like something died in it, but it kicks in _fast_ and when he really considers it, Penny thinks it might be the nicest thing anyone’s done for him in the last six months (If he doesn’t count the part where Quentin chopped off his hands because he begged him to, he’s still trying to figure out where to place that one on the scales) 

He’s nearly asleep again, stomach grumbling but no longer in open rebellion, resting his face against the nice friendly floorboards, when the Russian tromps in, drops a metal file by his head, says, “Come. I have other table.” Penny groans and drags himself to his feet, and he follows.

 

When that table is also merrily on the way to becoming sawdust (two days later maybe, Penny isn’t sure) Mayakovsky snaps, “You smell like week old gym sock.” The asshole’s not _wrong_ but also they’re in the Arctic, it’s cold as balls, and —oh, that’s right, it’s easy to forget— Penny’s sort of lost the magical ability to warm water. He doesn’t even say it, just turns his face downwards to the motherfucking table that's half sawdust—half table, and just _broadcasts_ it like an upturned middle finger.

Mayakovsky makes a noise that’s mostly, but not purely, disgust, and half an hour later, the Russian is snapping at his heels, got a hand at his collar, driving him like some recalcitrant quadruped toward some other room, some door he’s never entered. He balks for a moment; there’s mist, steam, whatever the fuck, wonders if maybe it’s a fucking hellmouth and he’s a sacrifice to the elder gods, and staggers against a hand shoved firm between his shoulderblades, until he realizes.

 

It’s a hot spring.

Realizes, while he’s simmering in it, staring at the ceiling, that this is the shit that yuppies pay thousands for, minerals and shit through the skin via osmosis and whatever magic Mayakovsky has roiling in it.

Realizes that this is Mayakovsky’s shit, some secret grotto closer to the center of the earth, closer to the magnetic pole, than most people, most human bodies are permitted to be. And this might be, really and truly, the nicest thing that anyone has done for him this year; those are not words that match up with Mayakovsky. And yet. Penny watches the man strip, wills himself not to stare and does anyway. Penny doesn’t know what he thought he would look like, pale skin faded paler yet under the weak arctic sun. And yet— Penny does not avert his gaze. Today is not the day that he will learn finer manners, or exercise an instinct for self-preservation.

The Russian sees him watching, but makes no comment, just lowers himself into the hot springs. Seems - amused. That lazy half-interest that bears and other carnivores can afford to have, because they have teeth and claws, because they know how to use them. He watches as Penny undresses, until he slides in at the other side, to the waist then to the neck. And goddamn, Chatwin’s torrent had nothing on the way the heat of the spring soaks into his muscles, his bones. He’s got no illusions that this shit will fix his hands, but he feels warm for the first time in recent memory, and for now he’ll take that.

He thinks the moment has passed when they at last climb out, dry themselves with towels that have appeared as if by magic (haha, magic) and robes that are warm and yes, fluffy. Penny is willing to look like a moron if it means being warm, and he squashes down the bitter little thread of disappointment that rises up when Mayakovsky dresses and turns away.

 

But, back in the workroom, Penny has already picked up the file, turned back to the half-unmade table, when Mayakovsky catches his arm. He turns, and Mayakovsky's eyes are dark, pupils blown, his face is suddenly very close to Penny’s (and some small part of Penny’s mind notes, hysterically, his breath is curiously devoid of the fumes of vodka). _May I,_ the Russian asks,and Penny realizes Mayakovsky is holding himself back.

His mouth goes dry, everything he wants he can’t say caught behind his teeth like ash and sawdust. Mayakovsky’s hand is closed loosely over his wrist, over the seam where old skin joins with new. Penny lets the file clatter to the floor, nods his head and leans in.

The heat of the spring has drawn tension from his body, not like booze, not like the bright pills left behind in his drawer at Brakebills. Not enough to make his face go numb, or his hands, so he can feel the unfamiliar drag of stubble against his own face, his hands moving of their own accord, wanting to touch. He’s rarely done this sober — Kady was the exception, not the rule, he thinks, and then pushes her from his mind. Mayakovsky’s mouth is warm on his mouth, his collarbone, his teeth are sharp, eyes bright as sun on new snow and focused only on him. He thinks he could burn from the heat, an ant under a magnifying glass, a firefly glancing too close to a bright blue halo of electricity.

 

It’s not the first time Penny’s been with a guy, not even close, but it’s the first time he’s been with this kind of man. And he shouldn’t find it hot, should he, the way he feels suddenly _breakable_ when Mayakovsky has him against the floor, not even pinned, not even a threat, just the knowledge of what he could be, could do — if Penny needed, if he asked. And he can’t, Penny _can’t_ , cannot ask, cannot need, but the knowledge is enough. The room is full of clear light and the thrum of five decades of magic coiled in those small batteries; in this moment the fall of darkness seems impossible and therefore inevitable.

They fuck and they sleep and when they wake it’s still light.

They stumble to bed, fuck again, sleep again.

 

When Penny wakes again, the sun is low on the horizon and there are pancakes on the table.

 

He laughs until he cries.  


**Author's Note:**

> Title from Richard Siken, cause everyone's gotta have an addiction and his poetry is (one of) mine.  
> "... It’s nothing like I thought it  
> would be and closer to what I meant. None of it is  
> real, darling. I say it to you. Maybe we will wake up  
> singing. Maybe we will wake up to the silence  
> of shoes at the foot of the bed not going anywhere."
> 
> If you read all the way to the end, thank you!  
> If you like it, please leave me a comment; it fills my sour little black heart with the motivation to write again.


End file.
